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Dear Harish,
My heartiest congratulations to you on your superb literary accomplishment. I enjoyed reading your creative master piece ,”King Asoka”. It has all the elements of a period novel-the history and its mysteries, emotions of love, hate, bravery, treachery, intrigues, remorse, pathos and even morbidity and gore. The description of the scene after the battle at Dhauli is, indeed, very moving. I feel you should ask your publisher to send your novel as an entry to one of the Commonwealth Literary Awards competitions. It has a fair chance of being short-listed and that would be a fitting reward to your labor of love.
However, in my humble view as a lay reader, the historical synopsis provided in the beginning of the novel, should preferably figure at the end. The reason. Despite stating that no claim is made for historical veracity, the reader’s mind ( at least, that is what I felt) keeps looking for historical correspondence of events and happenings. For instance, the historical authenticity of cow as a sacrificial bait or the extent of carnivores in the society at the relevant time—given the emphasis on meat eating and selling in the novel. Like-wise, your description of Asoka’s sexual imagery of love making with Anga and its analogy with that of Krishna’s love for Radha is a bit jarring. Even in a mythical sense the Radha-Krishna love was never physical.
I am quite hopeful your novel would get a good response from the public.
Warm regards,
Sincerely,
Prem
I wanted to congratulate you on the fabulous book that you have written. I read it about 2 weeks ago, and enjoyed every bit of it. I am generally very lackadaisical with my reading now but I just could not put down Asoka once I started it and read it in 3 days flat. Rhea was just amazed!
The detailed descriptions in the book reflect both the detail of your research and your imagination and your style of writing is truly captivating. The characters were so well fleshed out and the storyline very gripping. In short I just loved it. I passed it on to Poonam after that and she enjoyed it immensely too and wants Akshay to read it as well.
I am sure you are receiving glowing feedback from multiple sources. Is your publisher doing any events to promote the book?
Sunita
I received your book and read it right away. What a wonderful gem it turned out to be. I was surprised that some of it I recognized from the manuscript I read before. I loaned the book to a friend of mine to read and will pass it on to others eventually.
Ken
The blood, intrigue that made an emperor
http://www.asianage.com/books/blood-intrigue-made-emperor-359
Jun 27th, 2010 — Pooja Sharma
History may be about the dead, but it is never dead. A young fact grows into a youthful story over time. It gradually matures into a belief, then turns into a doubt-ridden narrative to end as a fiction. A writer intervenes and recreates history during any of these stages. The facts about the Maurya empire are over 2,100 years old as Harish Singhal works on them to churn out his debut novel, King Asoka: A Love Story.
A great deal has been said and written about the Mauryas, much of it sheer theory based on fragments of evidence spared by time. In social memory Mauryan emperor Ashoka was one of the greatest Indian kings of all time who journeyed from being Chanda, or the terrible, to Dhamma, the righteous. While much information about Ashoka’s rule is drawn from the pillars erected by him and from Buddhist texts, few reliable facts are known about his personal life. So what happened during the Kalinga war that transformed the king’s heart? The most accepted answer, and one supported by the inscriptions on Ashokan pillars, points to the massive bloodshed during the war. However, storytellers over the ages have tried to add to the motive. In this novel, Singhal allows history its due place yet weaves a fine mesh of fiction around it.
The novel opens with a dramatic episode of the eleven-year-old Ashoka’s brush with death in Kalinga. With that we step into a marvellous recreation of ancient India. There is no dearth of action here with palace intrigues, princes scrambling for the throne and queens fighting for their sons while King Bindusar struggles to keep together the vast empire he inherited from his father, Chandragupta Maurya. This is also an India still under the influence of Greek and Persian conquests. In fact, with the western border of the Mauryan empire reaching Kandahar, Greek-Persian empires are now India’s neighbours. The signs of Alexander’s visit are alive in the queens bartered at war.
Ashoka is an unfavoured prince to begin with. His mother Suba is a simple woman, uncomfortable with the role she must play to project her son as a prospective successor of the king. In the fierce palace environment she herself falls prey to an ambitious Livia, a Greek queen of the now dead Chandragupta Maurya, who takes Ashoka under her aegis. Ashoka is a thinking youth, an upright prince whose relationship with women always lands him in trouble. Ashoka beats the crown price at a horse race, thus presenting his claim to the crown, but that is not enough. Crown Prince Sasima flees Taxila at the first sign of revolt. Ashoka, who is sent in his place, decapitates the rebel and presents the head to his father. However, Sasima’s mother, the Queen, manipulates the King to forgive her son. As the King inches towards death Ashoka must fight for his crown. The struggle culminates in carnage at the palace with the queens drawing the daggers. Ashoka becomes the King and though he has a wife and two children, Mahendra and Sanghmitra, he has not yet found the woman who will share his throne. He finds that woman in Anga, grand-daughter of a former Taxila governor, and marries her after a long pursuit. The Kalinga war looms after a period of marital bliss.
The cause of the battle has not yet been clearly established by historians. Singhal picks an interesting lead as he leads us to a battle to the death for the statue of Jina, the Jain god. The predictable bloodshed follows but a unique turn in Ashoka’s life leads him to adopt Buddhism.
Singhal sticks to realistic descriptions and relies on imagination. The result is admirable. He has a powerful story to tell and it works well till he decides to explain what is much known. That Ganga was worshipped or the horse was a sign of majesty aren’t facts that need re-telling, particularly when there is a remarkable story at hand. His characters are well-etched and consistent, but as war approaches he tries to throw a few commoners into the arena to evoke the pathos of war. The story is unable to digest these last-minute creations and the effect is lost.
The narrative loses steam after the war but the writer is in no mood to sign off. He details what is inscribed on the pillars and ends only after Ashoka’s death, not realising that for the reader the novel ended 20 pages back.
Bollywood’s big-budget 2001 movie Asoka also traced a similar story of the king. Despite a power-packed performance by Shah Rukh Khan, Ashoka emerges as a ruthless murderer who gives a kill-all order to his soldiers when he thinks his beloved is dead. In Singhal’s story, however, Ashoka is set for greatness: he is brave but not ruthless, a much more complex character. Contrary to the biopic he doesn’t kill for love, instead he renounces violence for it. Both stories have their own version of how Chandagupta Maurya’s sword passed on to Ashoka and of the love angle. Singhal’s rendition of the intimate is bold and exquisite while the song-and-dance element in the film falls flat.
From the Greek princesses to the tribals of Kalinga, the sheer expanse of the novel is exhilarating. Singhal churns together fact and fiction to produce a magical story of love. When Ashoka attacks Taxila to claim his throne, Livia tells her story as she waits for the first sign of his victory: the story of the Greek princess who was brought to India as a war bride of Chandrgupta Maurya. In the words of author genius, anyone can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.
The Hindu
Literary Review
http://www.hindu.com/lr/2010/07/04/stories/2010070450200600.htm
NOVEL
Sweeping epic
SHREEKUMAR VARMA
Singhal’s Asoka is, in many ways, a novel that reclaims the grandeur of story-telling.
King Asoka: A Love Story; Harish Singhal, Har-Anand Publications; Rs.695.
The author vows this is a work of fiction: “No claim is made for historical veracity”. That’s a disclaimer we must keep in mind as we read the book, holding on as it bucks and twists beneath us. Harish Singhal writes, “This time around, Asoka had a rather unkingly beginning — he spent his time in my company.” That shows.
What goes around must come around. So the book begins in Kalinga where Asoka and his brother Tissa run into cannibals, and Asoka is almost quartered and eaten when he attempts to save a young boy, the human repast for the night. And it’s, of course, the Kalinga battle-field that plays a definitive role in Asoka’s transformation from ruthless ruler to humane propagator of Buddhism.
Rollercoaster ride
Between these two events lies a rollicking roller-coaster of a book that thrills, touches our emotions, disappoints, dips to the ridiculous, enchants with its descriptions; and generally shows us how much Singhal has appropriated this larger-than-life historical figure for himself.
Singhal, settled in San Fransisco, writes for a universal readership. His Americanisms, slang and casual contemporary references jar but growing accustomed to his flow, we simply see them as personal tools that bolster the robust retelling of his part-historical, part-whimsical saga. It works if we can take the novel as given, studying it within its own framework of reference.
Though even that often becomes difficult. At times, he gets beyond himself: A seller of animal glands tells Asoka, “Then I recommend a walk in the garden. You will be…gland.” During a festival, “people fussed and fumed and did the turkey trot.” When the Kalinga prime minister’s son Sisupal returns from a tryst with a prostitute, he says: “She bilked me of forty-five pana……it was highway lechery!” Asoka tells Tissa to “stop shaking in your pants.” And this: “The queen was shocked — no lightning rod was attached to her head.” Soon, the typos and the simply unedited get inextricably woven together. An editor could well have saved the runaway writer from himself.
For a modern audience
Singhal showcases Asoka for a modern, universal audience using their terms of reference. This might irk the Indian reader and historian but, when it comes to story-telling, Singhal is on top. One is often reminded of life-sketch fictions patented by Irving Stone. Singhal is at his best in his broad, colourful sketches of character and descriptions of nature, his grasp of emotion and easy depiction of grandeur and dream, love and loss. Occasionally, though, that’s but a step away from the maudlin.
Needing tighter control and general pruning, Asoka yet stands up as a sweeping epic of adventure, statesmanship, love and emotion, the offering of an artist taking a loving look at a towering historical figure. Asoka’s journey from self-doubt to replacement of faith is sparked by colourful and, for the most part, interestingly etched characters. His mother and the ambitious choti maa (Chandragupta Maurya’s queen from Greece, named Livia by Singhal), his father King Bindusar, friends and brothers, and the beautiful and enigmatic Anga are characters that stay with us. Asoka is, of course, the pillar. He emerges as a complex character, torn by early experience and the vision of his destiny, twists and turns that take him from the wonder of ambition to the wisdom of achievement.
The Kalinga war is depicted with rare energy. Asoka and Anga’s love story is charged with emotion, and wrought with poetic prose. The death of Anga and Asoka’s anguish cap an ethereal bond that can only be replaced by something equally — or more — significant: his reaching towards the new-age religion, Buddhism.
From a boy jailed for rape, Asoka rises to become a conqueror egged on to violence by his own people, and finally a visionary who must lead them to peace and tolerance. Singhal’s Asoka is, in many ways, a novel that reclaims the grandeur of story-telling.
It has all the qualities of a best-seller.
Very enjoyable, lively and vivid
“I enjoyed your writing, and the questioning of such matters as “God,” “life and death,” “religion,” “emptiness,” “happiness,” and “Karma,” as well as the historical material…”
Dear Harish,
I have just finished reading your novel “Asoka” and want to tell you how impressed I was and how grateful I am that you gave it to me. I think your technique of very, very short chapters was exceedingly wise and appropriate. The culmination in the adoption of Buddhism absolutely intrigued me, as I have always thought that it was the only form of spirituality that seemed “right” to me. Congratulations on this big achievement, and thank you again.
John
The novel continues to read like a lovely, and often a very funny dream. I must say, the author writes terrific love scenes. Asoka’s reunion with Anga is well worth the wait. Asoka himself is marvelous and memorable…
Wonderful. I cried in the last seventy pages
Hi Harish:
1. Asoka — what a writing! It is a poetry written in a prose. You must receive a Nobel Prize for such
writing! I do not exaggerate. I read tens of thousands books in my life, but never come across such
beautiful and unique writing. It makes me depressed when I compared your writing to mine. I am as a
4th grader amateur versus a great writer –you.
2) Fortunately, from age of 8-9, I was hooked on books. I started reading classic books, besides Russian writers, I did read all classic books written by foreign writers: Mark Twain, julieus
>Vern, Victor Hugo, George Sand, Maupassant, Stendhal, Goethe, Goiter, Eric
Maria Remark, Theodor Dreiser, Sherlock Holmes, and many, many more. But
it seems all classics did not help me to rise my writing to a literary level.
Glad that that all the work was worth the effort! Very satisfying.